Microsoft (News - Alert) has announced that a developer’s edition of its Internet Explorer browser is available for download.

“Today we’re excited to announce the release of the Internet Explorer Developer Channel, a fully functioning browser designed to give Web developers and early adopters a sneak peek at the Web platform features we’re working on,” an official company blog post said.

The Developer Channel version is available to both Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows 8.1 Update with Internet Explorer 11.

With the new Developer Channel, developers can test upcoming changes to the main version of Internet Explorer and detect any problems before the production version is pushed out. A lot of business web apps depend on IE, especially in intranets, so fixing bugs before they break major production systems is a must.

The developer version can run alongside the stable version, letting users test Web apps and other new features of the browser while keeping the stock IE.

The Developer Channel version also has some new development features. Microsoft has revamped the debugger, allowing programmers to set breakpoints during events to catch event-driven bugs.

Developers can also gain a more complete picture of Web app performance with memory and user interface profilers, as well as keyboard shortcuts that make navigating the profiler easier. A profiler is a programming tool that shows developers where a program is taking most of its time. The developers than try to minimize “hot spots,” parts of the program that take a disproportionate amount of CPU time or memory relative to the rest of the program.

Internet Explorer is the third major browser to offer a development track. Both Mozilla Firefox and Google (News - Alert) Chrome offer development and beta versions to developers and end-users who want “bleeding-edge” features. Mozilla even offers a nightly build, geared toward developers of the open source browser.